The Real Problem With The Economist's Most Influential Economists List

It has several problems, some of which the magazine
later acknowledged, and some of which it did not.

And the most striking problem, which still wasn't fixed, is this:
a complete lack of women.

"In no particular order, it ignores women; privileges gaffes over
real influence; and leaves out the most important economists of
all, central-bank governors," is the mea culpa from the editors,
tempered by the statement that, "much of [the criticism]
misunderstands how and why [the list] was put together."

The fact that Janet Yellen didn't make the list has been a big
deal for a lot of people.

According to The Economist, the list excludes central bank
governors, but only the top ones who are thought to speak for
their entire institutions. That means in practice that Janet
Yellen and Mario Draghi are excluded, but William Dudley and
Narayana Kocherlakota make it. Yellen didn't make the list not because
she's not popular enough, but because she'stoopopular, according to this system.

That seems weird to me, but I think it actually masks the bigger
flaw: the media bias underneath the methodology.

Here's the methodology of making the list (which was farmed out
to a startup called Appinions):

First The Economist started
with a batch of popular economists:

"We gave them a list of the top 450 authors of RePEc’s
ranking, and then rounded out that list with a few suggestions of
our own—among them popular bloggers such as Tyler Cowen and names
such as Jeffrey Sachs who don’t feature in the top echelons of
the RePEc list."

And here's how they say
Appinions ranked them:

"The Appinions algorithm then tracked these names across the
English-language internet, starting this September, capturing
instances when they were mentioned and weighting each mention to
reflect where it appeared and how many times it was mentioned. It
specifically tracked a 90-day period between September 11th and
December 11th."

So the first thing to consider is that The Economist did take
into account the fact that some actually mainstream, influential
economists might not make the RePEc (stands for "research
papers in economics") ranking.

It seems important that The Economist editors recognized and made
an effort to fix some biases in the data. There didn't seem to be
any effort to add women to the list, or consider where the women
went. But this is pretty minor compared to the real issue, which
is the system itself. This list reflects biases on biases on
biases.

First, economics as a whole has a gender problem, and there are a
lot of complicated reasons for that. For more, see Noah Smith
here and
here.

Carmen Reinhart, the most
influential female economist in the world.Google Images

The Appinions algorithm basically trawls the internet for
mentions of economists, and then ranks them. Men get quoted more,
men get mentioned more, and men are therefore "more influential."

For example, remember Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, the duo
who wrote the
super controversial pro-austerity paper (and book) that largely
defined many countries' fiscal policies in the aftermath of the
2010 euro crisis?

They wrote a hugely influential paper together. They were both
implicated in the controversial aftermath of that paper. They are
both big name professors at Harvard. Rogoff makes The Economist's
list, but Reinhart doesn't (despite being the most
influential female economist according to
RePEc). It's reasonable to assume they are at least
equal in influence. But Rogoff is mentioned in the news almost
twice as often.

Google
News

Google
News

Maybe it is just this simple: the media is much more likely to
quote men than women, regardless of actual influence in their
field.

For this particular list, the problem isn't really The
Economist's, and it's not really the economics profession's
(though maybe a little).